[erlang-questions] general questions for making large bookmarking site with Erlang

[bryan rasmussen]

Hi,

It's been some time since I've had a chance to do anything with
Erlang, now some friends and I have a project that we are starting
work on and because of the extreme scalability and uptime that I think
this project is going to require I want to use Erlang.

The best way to describe it without actually describing what it is is
to say that I am going to need to make basically what amounts to a
bookmarking service like delicious. That's fine enough, but I have a
fear that this service is going need to scale really big - let's
suggest as many users as Delicious (but probably more as I have
several innovations that I think will allow us to drain users from
other bookmarking service), I expect that because of the innovations I
am interested in introducing that our users will also use the site
significantly more than the other bookmarking services,and it will
probably also have days of extreme growth in the early days.

I was going to ask about some of the ideas I had for doing this and
provide more concrete details, but then I just realized that people
would start responding to those ideas (stuff like Hypertable, Yaws
etc.)


Instead I think I would just like some ideas from people, what do you
consider the best way that you would do this kind of thing
(bookmarking service with large userbase and high usage) using Erlang,
in which cases would you feel that you would step outside of Erlang
(for example, if you want to use a particular database that doesn't
have an already established Erlang api), and the reasons why this
would be optimal.

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen